Andrea Mantegna 1431 - 1506 Kevin J. Benoy. Andrea Mantegna Mantegna is often seen as the most...

Andrea Mantegna1431 - 1506

Kevin J. Benoy

Andrea Mantegna

• Mantegna is often seen as the most important painter of the early Renaissance after Masaccio.

Andrea Mantegna• He was adopted at 10 years

of age by the painter Francesco Squarcione.

• He became an established master of his own workshop at age 17.

• He was determined not to allow his adopted father to continue profiting from his talent.

• The two fought many legal battles.Virgin & Child by Squarcione

Andrea Mantegna

• Like Squarcione, Mantegna loved classical antiquities.

• His paintings consciously integrated antique forms.

• He helped spark general public interest in the ancient Roman world.

St. Sebastian

Andrea Mantegna• In 1459 he moved to

Mantua, where he worked for the Gonzaga family.

• They were great patrons of art and this guaranteed a steady income for the rest of his life.

• However, they were not particularly attractive subjects to paint.

Andrea Mantegna• His “Camera degli

Sposi” (Wedding Chamber) involved the painting of walls and ceilings to create the illusion of an open-air pavilion. This room foreshadowed later baroque interest in illusory work – more than a century before it became common.

Andrea Mantegna

• The painted occulus contained a joke that must have amused his sponsor no end.

• Diaperless cherubim perch precariously around its rim, while a tenuously balanced painted planter looks likely to fall on whoever stands beneath it.

Andrea Mantegna• His frescoes in Padua, at the

Church of the Eremitani, were lost forever – destroyed in a war-time explosion in 1944.

• They no exist only in reproductions and in a surviving preliminary sketch – the earliest such study we know of.

• It proves that, like Masaccio, Mantegna sketched the nude form first, adding clothes later.

Nude preliminary study

St. James on his way to execution.

Andrea Mantegna

• Mantegna took a keen interest in the new technique of mathematical perspective.

• His Dead Christ shocked viewers with its brutal realism, achieved by foreshortening.

Andrea Mantegna

• Mantegna was fascinated by the possibilities that perspective offered.

• He employed the so-called “worm’s eye” perspective to give an unusual viewpoint in many of his works.

Andrea Mantegna

• He also employed an interesting diagonal composition in the traditional Virgin & Child image.

• It is precisely this drive to innovate which makes him an important Renaissance painter.

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